Academics

Sociology 298. Experimental Courses

The World on a Screen: Globalization and the Sociology of National Cinema

This course will explore what selected national cinemas reveal about how their societies are coming to terms with their social, economic, political and cultural development. We will view representative films from India, Ireland, Iran, Israel/Palestine and Romania in conjunction with other documents to evaluate how filmmakers treat issues in their fellow citizens lives: including poverty and inequality; gender and family relationships; violence and political conflict; social and cultural change and other problems of living. Attention will also be paid to understanding the evolution of these various industries, their relationship to international cinema, what kinds of impact they may be having on both domestic and international audiences and how feature films can best be utilized as documents in social and cultural analysis.

Social Policy

This course will cover social policy development, trajectories, implementation, and contestation in the United States. We will study how public policy addresses social problems through the main sociological axes of inequality: race, class, gender, ethnicity, and location.